1How much do you know about languages? Do the quiz. Then read the article quickly and check your answers.
1How many spoken languages are there in the world?
2What percentage of the world's population speaks one of the twenty most common languages?
3What language do most people speak in Brazil?
4How many different words for 'ice' are there in the Yupik language of Alaska?
5Do you think the number of speakers of minority languages (which have got only a few hundred native speakers) is going up or down?
Did you know that every fourteen days one of the world's 7,000 languages dies out? What's more, 90% of the world's languages have got fewer than 100,000 speakers, and over 2,000 languages have got fewer than 1,000 speakers. Throughout human history, languages have disappeared because of natural disasters, war or genocide, but nowadays the most common reason is globalization. This is happening all over the world. In the Amazon rainforest, for example, indigenous people are learning Portuguese so that they can move to the big cities in Brazil to find work. In South Africa, young people are choosing to use English instead of traditional languages like Venda and Tsonga because they need English to study in higher education.
About 60% of the world's population speak one of the twenty most common languages, and the figures for speakers of world languages such as English, Spanish and Chinese are increasing rapidly. Would we really miss most small languages if they died out completely? The answer has got to be 'yes'. When a language vanishes, we lose the culture and history of a people which may be thousands of years old. We also lose the knowledge of the people who speak the language. In a famous case in northern Australia, doctors couldn't find a cure for a skin problem that people in the area developed. When they asked a local Aboriginal woman, she used her own language to describe a plant which was a cure for the disease. There are many other examples of why disappearing languages are important. Speakers of the Kallawaya language in Bolivia have got words for medicinal plants in their part of the rainforest which doctors in the modern world have never heard of, and speakers of the Yupik language of Alaska have got ninety-nine words for ice, a fact that shows that they've got a unique understanding of their world. Our planet would lose that understanding if these languages disappeared.
If you wanted to make your language cooler and more interesting for young people, what would you do? Well, linguistics professor K. David Harrison, who has travelled the world to look for the last speakers of endangered languages, believes that using social media, YouTube, text messaging and other digital technologies is one way of making languages exciting, and rescuing them from becoming extinct. In North America, for example, Native Americans are using social media to put young people interested in their language in touch with each other. Teenagers go online and chat to other adolescents in languages like Cherokee or Navajo, or they teach their language online to people of all races all over the world.
Another exciting project is to create talking dictionaries. Professor Harrison, together with linguists from National Geographic's Enduring Voices project, has just helped to produce eight talking dictionaries, which contain more than 32,000 word entries in eight endangered languages. There are also 24,000 audio recordings of native speakers pronouncing words and sentences, and some photographs of cultural objects.
In the next one hundred years, the number of languages on the planet will decrease, but we don't have to lose as many as some people think. Using modern technology can save small languages, and we mustn't lose the culture, history and knowledge that these languages contain.
Did you know that every fourteen days one of the world's 7,000 languages dies out? What's more, 90% of the world's languages have got fewer than 100,000 speakers, and over 2,000 languages have got fewer than 1,000 speakers. Throughout human history, languages have disappeared because of natural disasters, war or genocide, but nowadays the most common reason is globalization. This is happening all over the world. In the Amazon rainforest, for example, indigenous people are learning Portuguese so that they can move to the big cities in Brazil to find work. In South Africa, young people are choosing to use English instead of traditional languages like Venda and Tsonga because they need English to study in higher education.
About 60% of the world's population speak one of the twenty most common languages, and the figures for speakers of world languages such as English, Spanish and Chinese are increasing rapidly. Would we really miss most small languages if they died out completely? The answer has got to be 'yes'. When a language vanishes, we lose the culture and history of a people which may be thousands of years old. We also lose the knowledge of the people who speak the language. In a famous case in northern Australia, doctors couldn't find a cure for a skin problem that people in the area developed. When they asked a local Aboriginal woman, she used her own language to describe a plant which was a cure for the disease. There are many other examples of why disappearing languages are important. Speakers of the Kallawaya language in Bolivia have got words for medicinal plants in their part of the rainforest which doctors in the modern world have never heard of, and speakers of the Yupik language of Alaska have got ninety-nine words for ice, a fact that shows that they've got a unique understanding of their world. Our planet would lose that understanding if these languages disappeared.
If you wanted to make your language cooler and more interesting for young people, what would you do? Well, linguistics professor K. David Harrison, who has travelled the world to look for the last speakers of endangered languages, believes that using social media, YouTube, text messaging and other digital technologies is one way of making languages exciting, and rescuing them from becoming extinct. In North America, for example, Native Americans are using social media to put young people interested in their language in touch with each other. Teenagers go online and chat to other adolescents in languages like Cherokee or Navajo, or they teach their language online to people of all races all over the world.
Another exciting project is to create talking dictionaries. Professor Harrison, together with linguists from National Geographic's Enduring Voices project, has just helped to produce eight talking dictionaries, which contain more than 32,000 word entries in eight endangered languages. There are also 24,000 audio recordings of native speakers pronouncing words and sentences, and some photographs of cultural objects.
In the next one hundred years, the number of languages on the planet will decrease, but we don't have to lose as many as some people think. Using modern technology can save small languages, and we mustn't lose the culture, history and knowledge that these languages contain.
1On average, we lose a language a week from the face of the Earth.
2In the past, the most common reason for losing a language was a natural disaster.
3One reason why people stop using traditional languages is to get better work opportunities.
4The number of people speaking all of the world's top twenty languages is going up.
5The disappearance of a language results in a loss of information about the world.
6No one speaks the Yupik language any more.
7Professor Harrison can speak eight endangered languages.
8Professor Harrison is planning to work on more talking dictionaries in the future.
9If we use modern technology, we won't lose any more endangered languages.
Did you know that every fourteen days one of the world's 7,000 languages dies out? What's more, 90% of the world's languages have got fewer than 100,000 speakers, and over 2,000 languages have got fewer than 1,000 speakers. Throughout human history, languages have disappeared because of natural disasters, war or genocide, but nowadays the most common reason is globalization. This is happening all over the world. In the Amazon rainforest, for example, indigenous people are learning Portuguese so that they can move to the big cities in Brazil to find work. In South Africa, young people are choosing to use English instead of traditional languages like Venda and Tsonga because they need English to study in higher education.
About 60% of the world's population speak one of the twenty most common languages, and the figures for speakers of world languages such as English, Spanish and Chinese are increasing rapidly. Would we really miss most small languages if they died out completely? The answer has got to be 'yes'. When a language vanishes, we lose the culture and history of a people which may be thousands of years old. We also lose the knowledge of the people who speak the language. In a famous case in northern Australia, doctors couldn't find a cure for a skin problem that people in the area developed. When they asked a local Aboriginal woman, she used her own language to describe a plant which was a cure for the disease. There are many other examples of why disappearing languages are important. Speakers of the Kallawaya language in Bolivia have got words for medicinal plants in their part of the rainforest which doctors in the modern world have never heard of, and speakers of the Yupik language of Alaska have got ninety-nine words for ice, a fact that shows that they've got a unique understanding of their world. Our planet would lose that understanding if these languages disappeared.
If you wanted to make your language cooler and more interesting for young people, what would you do? Well, linguistics professor K. David Harrison, who has travelled the world to look for the last speakers of endangered languages, believes that using social media, YouTube, text messaging and other digital technologies is one way of making languages exciting, and rescuing them from becoming extinct. In North America, for example, Native Americans are using social media to put young people interested in their language in touch with each other. Teenagers go online and chat to other adolescents in languages like Cherokee or Navajo, or they teach their language online to people of all races all over the world.
Another exciting project is to create talking dictionaries. Professor Harrison, together with linguists from National Geographic's Enduring Voices project, has just helped to produce eight talking dictionaries, which contain more than 32,000 word entries in eight endangered languages. There are also 24,000 audio recordings of native speakers pronouncing words and sentences, and some photographs of cultural objects.
In the next one hundred years, the number of languages on the planet will decrease, but we don't have to lose as many as some people think. Using modern technology can save small languages, and we mustn't lose the culture, history and knowledge that these languages contain.
1disappears completely or stops existing:
2belonging to a particular place or country rather than coming to it from somewhere else:
3stop having something any more:
4feel sad because you haven't got something any more:
5at risk of being destroyed or damaged:
6stop someone or something from being destroyed or damaged:
7no longer active or existing:
1In 2008, linguists announced that the Alaskan language Eyak had after the death of the last native speaker, Marie Smith Jones. However, the language was later by a French student called Guillaume Leduey, who became interested in Eyak as a teenager while reading about it on the internet, and then learned to speak it.
2Yangkam is an language in Africa. There are only a hundred speakers and all of them are over fifty years old. Most of the Yangkam people now speak Hausa, one of the major national languages of Nigeria. They've other elements of their cultural identity, but don't consider their language an important part of their culture.
3The Gaagudju language of the Aborigines, the people of Australia, has been since the last speaker, Big Bill Neidjie, died in 2002. Since the eighteenth century, we've 190 Aboriginal languages in Australia. Nobody speaks them any more.
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5 CHALLENGE! Read the quote below. What knowledge would the the world lose if your language disappeared? Speak for no longer than one minute. 'When a language disappears, we lose the knowledge of the people who speak the language.' |
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